Do you make level blocking ?

News & General Discussion
1

Hi,

When you work on level design, do you use level blocking and test some gameplay,
before adding detailled models and effects ?

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2

Yeah of course…?

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Whiteboxing/greyboxing is common practice across the entire industry.

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4

Of course. Why would you not?

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5

Because you can start making a level from production ready 3D tiles and models, without doing some blocking level research and gameplay test phase for example.

6

You can… but to begin with, how do you know what tiles to make before you’ve done a bunch of test levels?

For my current game we’ve now got our first set of tiles, and we’ll probably use them for level building from now on. Still, the first bunch of levels were all made with ProBuilder and its default materials with colour tweaks, because it’s all we needed at that stage and it was fast, which is what really matters.

Only after we had levels that played how we wanted did the artist I’m working with make a tileset.

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7

Yeah, but some for some already planned game style like a small dungeon game you can start prototype the levels with 3D Tiles pack you baught , same for exterior level if you already have the 3D models you will use.
Blocking is mostly used when your level floor and base is not made of 3D tiles.

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8

No, because nobody cares what it looks like. Your comment about “dungeon” clearly indicates you need to think again about the purpose of blocking out / greyboxing.

Yeah but this is like saying water is wet.

What’s the point I’ve missed? :stuck_out_tongue:

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9

It’s all about speed. Like @hippocoder says, at that stage nobody cares about what it looks like.

If your tools allow you to use actual tiles faster than you can drag out basic shapes, cool, do that. Otherwise, you start with the big things first - shape of the level, path that players move along, interaction points, cover locations, pickups, etc - and iterate on them until you’re happy before moving onto the next level of increased detail, and so on.

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10

Even on a simple game like Pond Wars I blocked things out before getting the final art ready. No point getting a boat drawn up all pretty in paint before I knew what size it needed to be.

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